Flexible Key Exchange Negotiation for Wireless Sensor Networks

Despite recent improvements of the capabilities of Wireless Sensor Networks (WSN) nodes, network protocol support for key management is still lagging behind. While in traditional networks well known protocol suites (e.g., IPsec IKE and the TLS handshake), are commonly used for flexible negotiation of the cryptographic and key exchange protocols, to the best of their knowledge no similar support has been provided for the same operation in WSNs. The goal of this paper is therefore threefold. The authors discuss the design of a flexible security negotiation protocol for WSNs, and they suggest to adapt TLS handshake ideas to obtain maximum flexibility.